Conversation & Presentation

Motherless Tongues: Harmonics of Belonging and Estrangement by Amelia Rosselli and Etel Adnan

Fri, Mar 6, 2026

4:00 PM–6:00 PM

4406: English Student Lounge, CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public. No registration required.

Join us for a talk from Jennifer Scappettone‘s Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, October 2025), a book that uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues.

Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone presents a new book that traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. As Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger, poets Amelia Rosselli and Etel Adnan developed poetic, musical, and painterly strategies for tuning in to a more-than-national “panmusic” rebuking the confines of the brotherhood and “tribe.”

Jennifer Scappettone is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author as well of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice.

This event is organized as part of the English PhD program’s Friday Forums, organized by Nico Israel and the English Twentieth-Century Area Group, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Lost and Found at the CUNY Graduate Center.